Sometimes things that need fixing around here go without for a very long time. It could be cost or time that prevents any action, but you can’t take ten steps without running into one of these problems:

giant potholes you could lose a car in (such as a Festiva)

a toilet bowl that runs if you don’t hold the handle just right and cross your fingers as you do it

a shower that clogs every time you’re in the shower, hence the plunger relegated only to the shower

a door hanging off the entertainment center

a washer that always needs an extra spin cycle and a dryer that always needs two cycles to dry

These are just some of the things that I notice on a daily basis and repeatedly remind myself to take care of, but I never get to it or the problem is only worsened by neglect. Obviously, I’ve left off anything from the farm because what I declare a problem, my husband thinks is perfectly fine, therefore, I have plenty of material for this blog.

Recently, I realized a method of getting things fixed around here in a rather sneaky way. It somewhat stems from my husband’s theory of, “Do it wrong, and they’ll never ask you again,” but it didn’t dawn on me until I saw my mother-in-law closing a gate. After leaving her house one afternoon, I came upon the Fed-Ex man pulled over on the side of the road, contemplating helping a goat that had it’s head caught in the fence. I saved him from this battle of wills and told him I could get it. After cussing at the goat for a minute, he finally gave up the fight and allowed me to help him from his prison. As he ran off down the line to find his flock, I realized that his flock was out on the gravel road. One problem leads to another around here. Truly, a lesson I should learn is that if they’re not mine, ignore it and keep moving.

There was a gate near the goats, so I slowly drove around them and opened the gate. It was a rigged up gate with panels wired on as extra protection against sneaky goats. It didn’t have a chain or latch, just wire to close it. I got the goats in, and called my mother-in-law to let her know her goats had been out in case there was a hole in the fence I didn’t noticed. Just so you know, with goats, there is never a hole in the fence. They magically get out even if the fence is ten feet high. As she drove down, she found a straggler I hadn’t noticed, so I opened the gate again. It went in and my mother-in-law decided to close the gate herself. I had wired it from a larger wire that held it to the post when I got there, but the wire was too thick for her and she couldn’t quite get it around the fence wire and she didn’t think that was enough anyway.

I’ll describe my mother-in-law for a moment so you understand. If something bad will happen, she’s already imagined it. While she was trying to wire the gate with the one large wire, she was probably picturing the wire falling off, the goats stampeding out, invading a neighbor's farm, making it to the nearest highway causing a horrific crash that would be on the nightly news involving a school bus full of children, then continuing on their rampage throughout the country and assassinating Miss Universe. I’m 99% sure this is how her mind works. So, instead of wiring the fence with the large wire once, she pulled off a thinner, longer wire and started wiring the gate shut, not in just one place, but all over. I included a diagram of what the wire looked like after she was done wiring it shut.

It took a while and the whole time I was thinking, “My father-in-law is going to get POed when he tries to get in this gate.” He would have no idea where to start. Then the genius idea dawned on me: If I did this to John, he’d get so flustered, he’d put a good latch on it just to avoid the confrontation it would start to discuss how to wire a gate. He would know that it would never go his way, and it would be easier just to make the gate easy to open and close rather than have this conversation. I generally don’t complain to him about these kinds of things (I just vent in the blog), but he knows that if he complains to me about how I would handle his rigged up farm problems, I’d get the upper hand easily by arguing, “I can’t live like this.” I’ve used this once when the insulation wasn’t all finished in the house, and I was freezing to death. Out of fear that I would move to a completed home and he wouldn’t have his dinner every night, he put up all the insulation while I was at work the next day. I’m pretty sure I could use the fear of starvation against him anytime I wanted. Now I need to come up with ideas on how to use this properly and efficiently. I’m currently narrowing down which problem I should exacerbate. I’m really leaning toward messing with his Festiva, but it will look suspicious if something happens to it under my watch because I generally avoid it like the plague and would walk five miles to town rather than drive it. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Any help would be appreciated.